Sandy Whisler was surprised to see her name appear on the Wisconsin State Journal’s editorial page — not in a letter to the editor, which she sometimes writes, but in a Nov. 20 editorial.

Whisler, a retired educator in Lake Mills, had emailed four state legislators urging them to hold hearings on proposed bills to create a nonpartisan process for legislative redistricting — the redrawing of voter boundaries after every ten-year Census. The arguments against this change, she mused, “must be weak if you fear a public discussion.”

The State Journal, which has been calling for these hearings for months, along with other state media, quoted from this and other contacts obtained by the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism through open records requests. (For links to these records, see http://tinyurl.com/lavk77k.)

Scott Milfred, the State Journal’s editorial page editor, has heard no complaints from the people whose emails the paper quoted. Whisler, after her initial surprise, didn’t mind a bit: “I’m proud to have my name used to say, ‘You need to listen to the public.’ ”

All four lawmakers blacked out personal information like email addresses, home addresses and phone numbers. Sen. Mary Lazich, R-New Berlin went further, redacting names and places of residence from the 200 contacts she released.

Lazich, asked for an explanation, wrote that citizens “must have total freedom to contact me on issues of concern to them” and claimed releasing personal information would “chill free speech and debate in the legislative process.”

Leave aside the question of whether Lazich is really driven by concern for these correspondents, whose mostly polite and heartfelt calls for hearings she has thus far rebuffed. There is a broader issue: the public has a right to know who is saying what to elected officials.

In 2011, Rep. John Nygren, R-Marinette, used the same arguments in purging the names of people who wrote him regarding changes to state insurance law. Nygren, to his credit, ultimately backed down, and the belatedly released names showed that two-thirds were insurance agents or industry employees.

In another case, state Sen. Jon Erpenbach, D-Middleton, is being sued by a conservative group for purging identifiers from emails he received over the collective bargaining issue. He won at the trial court level, but that decision is being appealed.

State legislators are already exempt from the records retention rules in place for all other state and local officials. Thus state Sen. Scott Fitzgerald, R-Juneau, was able to legally delete dozens of the emails he received on redistricting — those from people who did not clearly live in his district.

But blacking out “Sandy Whisler” and “Lake Mills” is another matter. An email to a lawmaker stripped of its author’s name is like an unsigned letter to the editor — which, absent some compelling reason for anonymity, most papers would not print.

Says Ginnie Kester, a Madison resident whose name Lazich redacted, “I wouldn’t have written it if I wanted privacy.”

The state Justice Department, charged with interpreting the open records law, is not involved in the ongoing litigation over this issue. It has advised at training sessions that “constituent names generally should be disclosed unless the balancing test applied on individual circumstances indicates that withholding or redaction is appropriate,” says DOJ spokeswoman Dana Brueck.

Lazich's redactions run contrary to this advice, and to the spirit of openness that has elsewhere served the state well. In most cases, citizens like Sandy Whisler are and should be proud of the positions they take in their contacts with elected officials. There's no need to keep their identities secret.

State Sen. Glenn Grothman, R-West Bend, would like to change the way Wisconsin records campaign donations. He’s introduced a bill to raise the threshold for when donors to state and local campaigns must disclose their occupations from its current level of more than $100 to more than $500.

The bill would also eliminate the requirement that the donor’s principal place of employment be disclosed.

Grothman says the change is needed to reduce the harassment of businesses whose employees back candidates. In 2012, for instance, boycotts were launched against some companies whose executives backed Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker.

The bill, SB 282 and its companion, AB 378, has had hearings in both legislative houses and appears to be on a fast track to passage.

But the bill is a bad idea, for various reasons. That’s why it has drawn opposition from editorial boards, good government groups and even people like me: a blogger for the website Fairly Conservative.

As I told the Senate committee that held a recent hearing on this bill, I rely on databases that provide campaign finance information. I use them to identify contributors, note patterns and break stories.

A couple of weeks ago, I noted that the Potawatomi were big donors to Walker; the tribe opposes the expansion of casino gambling, which Walker has the power to do. In Brookfield, I use similar reports to determine which developers are bankrolling which local candidates.

Employer information also helps differentiate donors.

Believe it or not, there is more than one Mary Burke who lives in Madison and who has given money to state candidates. It helps that some donations are identified with her former employer, Trek Bicycle.

Grothman and committee chair Sen. Mary Lazich, R-New Berlin, noted that a donor’s occupation would still be listed for donations of under $500, just not his or her employer. But removing this information would it make impossible to get a true picture of how much money is coming in from, say, casino employees.

Currently, the maximum contribution to Assembly candidates as well as every school board, municipal and county (except Milwaukee) candidate fall under the new threshold. This information would disappear for all of their donors.

According to Mike McCabe, executive director of the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, 96 percent of the 862,064 donations in its “Follow the Money” database are for $500 or less.

Kevin Kennedy, director and general counsel of the state Government Accountability Board, which compiles and posts campaign finance information for state candidates, also opposes the change.

Kennedy told the Senate committee that his agency has used the employee information to identify instances in which wealthy donors were evading spending limits by illegally funneling contributions through their employees.

As for people and business getting blowback because of the candidates they support, Kennedy said, “That's part of the price of our democracy.”

The Wisconsin law that covers campaign financing begins with a declaration, which reads in part: “When the true source of support or extent of support is not fully disclosed, or when a candidate becomes overly dependent upon large private contributors, the democratic process is subjected to a potential corrupting influence.”

I agree. While businesses have legitimate concerns about operating in safety, boycotts are a respected component of our American political environment. There are laws already in place to guard against some of the intimidation and harassment Grothman cited during his defense of the bill.

Wisconsin has a proud history of transparency in government. We can continue that tradition by rejecting this attempt to restrict the public’s right to know.

Your Right to Know is a monthly column distributed by the Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council (www.wisfoic.org), a nonprofit group dedicated to open government. Cindy Kilkenny, who blogs at Fairly Conservative and is the author of an ebook on Scott Walker, lives in Brookfield.

State Sen. Leah Vukmir, R-Wauwatosa, is making a novel legal argument to dodge a public records request. It’s one that, carried to its logical extreme, could neuter Wisconsin’s Open Records Law.

Vukmir is claiming legislative immunity from a June lawsuit filed by the liberal Center for Media and Democracy, which has alleged that she failed to turn over records related to the American Legislative Exchange Council. ALEC, a lightning rod for liberals, works with conservative state legislators around the country to write model legislation.

In a motion filed by state Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen’s office, Vukmir claims she can’t be sued while the Legislature is in session. If her argument prevails, lawmakers could no longer be compelled to comply with open records requests. Here’s why:

Legislators recently have defined their “sessions” as beginning on the day they are sworn in and lasting until the next time they are sworn in. That would make Vukmir immune from lawsuit for the entire time she remains in office, which could be for many years.

In a statement, Vukmir writes that she has complied with CMD’s open records request “and will continue to comply with all future requests for records, including two recent requests by CMD.”

But when will she comply? And why does she believe she deserves such broad immunity? The senator ought to answer those questions.

In the past, the state has argued that the constitution provides immunity from civil proceedings only during floor sessions, says Madison attorney Susan Crawford, a former assistant attorney general. That was the state’s position during the legislative caucus scandal a decade ago, she said.

Crawford notes that the attorney general is the state officer charged with enforcing the Open Records Law and now is arguing, essentially, that the law cannot be enforced against legislators. No court could hold them accountable, as long as they are in office.

In the past, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have been sued under the Open Records Law. Those legislators either acknowledged the violation and turned over the documents or fought it out in court.

The constitutional provision, and similar ones in other state constitutions, can be traced to English common law, which aimed to prevent political foes from suing their rivals as a ploy to remove them from the floor during sessions of Parliament. Legislative immunity, then, was created to protect the democratic process – not to protect the politicians. Vukmir’s tactic turns a very reasonable idea on its head.

This should not be a partisan issue: Everyone benefits from transparency in government. Rick Esenberg, a Milwaukee lawyer and blogger often allied with Republicans, recently told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that the Vukmir/Van Hollen motion “would seem to extend the scope of the exemption provision well beyond its original meaning.”

And this broad interpretation of immunity might also lead to claims in other kinds of civil lawsuits. Some legislators serve for decades. Would they have to respond to any civil claim while in office?

Van Hollen’s actions are a disappointment. He has been a strong supporter of open government in the past. When state Sen. Jon Erpenbach, D-Middleton, was sued by the conservative MacIver Institute over emails the senator received during the collective bargaining battle in 2011, Van Hollen declined to take the case. He should have done the same this time.

As for Vukmir, she says she has “always believed in transparency in government.”

She can demonstrate it by dropping her claim. She and Van Hollen may hope to cloak themselves in the state constitution, but in this instance it looks like a very poor fit.

Your Right to Know is a monthly column distributed by the Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council (www.wisfoic.org), a nonprofit group dedicated to open government. David D. Haynes is editorial page editor of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

State Rep. John Nygren and Sen. Alberta Darling might be the masterminds behind plans to legalize bounty hunters in Wisconsin, boot an investigative journalism center from the UW-Madison campus and add a credit for private school tuition to the state’s tax code.

After all, the Republican co-chairs of the Legislature’s Joint Finance Committee are the official sponsors of Motion 999, added to the biennial state budget in the early morning hours of June 5. The motion included those measures and nearly two dozen more, all approved with minimal debate.

Or Nygren and Darling may just have been carrying water for other legislative Republicans. We may never know.

That’s because the legislative process allows these measures to be added without being tied to any particular source.

Gov. Scott Walker vetoed the budget amendments regarding bounty hunters and the investigative journalism center, but left intact the new tuition tax credit of up to $10,000 for each private school student.

Doesn’t the public have a right to know who came up with these ideas? This would let voters hold their elected officials accountable at the ballot box and look for potential conflicts, like special interest cash flowing to a given lawmaker.

“It’s a huge problem in every respect,” said Jay Heck, executive director of Common Cause in Wisconsin. “It’s a terrible way to legislate and a terrible way to make decisions about taxpayer dollars.”

But that’s how the Joint Finance Committee has worked for at least two decades, under both Democrats and Republicans. Heck and others say the practice has gotten worse in recent years, as legislative power has been concentrated and politics become more polarized.

Unlike most bills, the $70 billion state budget is typically changed only by the small group of lawmakers who serve on the Joint Finance Committee. Successful floor amendments are possible, but rare. Usually, other lawmakers must go through a committee member, and those changes often get pulled together in an amendment like Motion 999.

“This 999 motion is something we found out about at 1:30 in the morning and we had to vote on it at 5:30 or something,” said Sen. Glenn Grothman, R-West Bend, a member of the finance committee.

Grothman groused that he wasn’t involved in the discussions that led to Motion 999. If he were, he would have fought for an even greater private school tuition tax break, which he thinks was inspired by earlier legislation he drafted.

“It’s a pretty closed process,” Todd Berry, president of the Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance, said of the way the finance committee writes the budget. “Most other states don’t do it the way we do it.”

Neither Darling, of River Falls, nor Nygren, of Marinette, returned calls to discuss the process. But committee member Sen. Sheila Harsdorf, R-River Falls, defended it, somewhat. She said most of budget provisions can be traced to a previously introduced bill or policy statements made by a lawmaker.

Moreover, the final votes on the budget are a matter of public record.

“At the point you vote for it or against it you’re taking ownership,” Harsdorf said. “It’s not as important to me who introduced it as to whether I support it or oppose.”

And that should bother everyone — from open government advocates to the lawmakers themselves.

Your Right to Know is a monthly column distributed by the Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council (www.wisfoic.org), a nonprofit group dedicated to open government. Mark Pitsch, a council member, is an assistant city editor at the Wisconsin State Journal and president of the Madison professional chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists.

On July 30, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported on newly released emails between Scott Walker’s campaign staff and county aides in 2010, back when the future governor was Milwaukee county executive.

One email was from Cindy Archer, then a top county aide, to Walker and his campaign staff, advising that “we may be responding too quickly” to open records requests regarding a county parking structure collapse that killed a 15-year-old boy.

The requests were from the state Democratic Party and the campaign of Walker’s GOP primary opponent, which presumably wanted to use the tragedy to impugn Walker. That’s a pretty low motivation — Walker, in a draft statement, aptly called it “disgusting” — but the state’s Open Records Law does not allow a requester’s motives to be taken into account.

Archer, in one email, relayed that Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, Walker’s Democratic rival for governor, was taking three months to even acknowledge the receipt of records requests. In another, she said her sense from Walker’s campaign manager “is that we should be operating one step above ignoring them.”

Has it come to this? That public officials in Wisconsin are in a kind of backwards race with each other to see who can take the longest to answer records requests?

That may be. Delays are a growing problem for records requesters in Wisconsin. The Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council recently updated its online list of “Open Government Problem Areas” and put “Long waits” at the top.

Some records custodians take much longer than others, and may treat requesters differently. Delays may be indicative of disfavor, which is disappointing.

The national People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals says the University of Wisconsin-Madison took until late July to complete a records request PETA made last December and paid for in February. The university is seeking a blanket exemption from the law for certain research records.

Earlier this year, I reported that the state Department of Administration took 352 days to satisfy one records request — coincidentally concerning Archer, who became a top DOA official until abruptly resigning in September 2011, shortly before her Madison home was raided by the FBI (long story).

An analysis showed that DOA, on average, took 24 days to answer the more than 200 requests it received in the first half of 2012. Requests from businesses were answered in an average of 17 days; those from media took an average of 56 days.

Political and advocacy groups also experienced longer waits, the analysis found.

Wisconsin’s Open Records Law states that custodians should handle records requests “as soon as practicable and without delay.” The state Attorney General’s Office, which has statutory authority to interpret and enforce the law, advises that most simple requests should receive a response within ten working days.

But beyond that, the office has not wanted to press the issue of how long is too long. In 2009, it told a requester that it was unable to say whether the two-and-a-half months he had waited for records he paid $700 for was “unreasonable,” since the request may have been time-consuming.

Pretend to read my lips: Two and a half months is too long.

Yes, responding to records requests takes staff resources and time. But the law specifically instructs government officials in Wisconsin that providing access to records “is declared to be an essential function of a representative government and an integral part of the routine duties of officers and employees.”

In other words, “whenever we get around to it” is not good enough.

Your Right to Know is a monthly column distributed by the Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council (www.wisfoic.org), a nonprofit group dedicated to open government. Bill Lueders is the group's president.

The University of Wisconsin-Madison has requested that the state Legislature grant it an exemption from Wisconsin's Open Records Law.

The proposed legislation, if passed, would limit public access to university records and diminish independent scrutiny of the state's flagship university.

In pursuit of this exemption, UW-Madison officials have circulated proposed language, initially to a list of Republican-only legislators. The two-page memo contained a range of arguments for granting increased protection of “intellectual property,” primarily the growing proportion of on-campus research and development.

The proposed legislation, which the UW initially tried to get put into the state budget bill, is overly broad. If passed, it would inevitably lead to abuse.

It would allow the withholding of information “produced or collected by or for faculty or staff of public institutions of higher learning in the conduct of or as a result of study or research on commercial, scientific or technical subjects,” until it has been publicly released, published or patented.

This exemption would pertain whether the research was “sponsored by the institution alone or in conjunction with a governmental body or private concern.”

The UW-Madison sponsors argue that this change is needed to deter the theft of valuable research before it can be patented. Their memo to lawmakers warned darkly of “the possibility that public records laws can be used as a tool for competing researchers to gain premature access to the ideas of others places the University at a competitive disadvantage with respect to recruiting and retaining high caliber researchers.”

In other words, a research funder might lose anticipated returns on its investment because a competitor gained access to key information through an open records request. If so, that funder might take its money elsewhere — to a private institution unconcerned with public access. Researchers would follow suit, to the detriment of the UW and state.

Wishing to curtail the number of records requests — especially by those raising ethical concerns about specific “public-private partnerships” — the proposal’s sponsors also argue that current procedures are too cumbersome and expensive.

But that argument can be made for any use of the records law. So can the argument that the public is entitled to know what its publicly funded institutions are doing.

Not long ago, I teamed with journalist Steve Horn to examine the ethically questionable relationship between UW-Madison and the dictatorial regime in Kazakhstan. We obtained records that could easily have been denied us if the current proposed changes existed.

Some of what we received, including contracts with the Kazakh regime, were vetted by the university’s legal office. Some of the material was redacted to protect privacy and security concerns.

Clearly, the existing procedures and safeguards are adequate. The UW office in charge of fulfilling requests never has, and is not about to, give away any scientific or trade secrets.

Further restrictions on access to records at the UW-Madison will not serve the public interest.

If the details of various “public-private partnership” deals can be withheld by some “authority” based on a subjective and over-reaching interpretation of the law, then what becomes of legitimate inquiry regarding the ethics and propriety of such ventures?

It’s a policy that runs roughshod over the university’s proclaimed commitment to openness, transparency and citizen access.Your Right to Know is a monthly column distributed by the Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council (www.wisfoic.org), a nonprofit group dedicated to open government. Allen Ruff is a Madison-based U.S. historian and researcher.

Back in 1990, when Milwaukee launched the nation’s first publicly funded voucher program, participating schools could enroll no more than 49 percent voucher students. These schools were considered private, because the majority of their students paid private tuition.

Fast-forward to 2013.

Now, more than half of Milwaukee’s 110 voucher schools have at least 95 percent of students on publicly funded vouchers. In one-fifth of these schools, every student receives a voucher.

Yet because voucher schools are still classified as “private,” they can — and do — ignore Wisconsin’s open records and meetings laws. It’s a double standard that undermines transparency and shields information from parents and the public.

Let’s say you want to enroll your child in St. Anthony School, which receives more taxpayer dollars than any other school in Milwaukee’s voucher program.

As a parent, you may want to know which textbooks the school uses, how many teachers are licensed, what topics are covered in curricula, and the school’s graduation, dropout, suspension and expulsion rates. You might want to review agendas and minutes from governance meetings, or see a breakdown of families’ income distribution.

Only you can’t, unless the school decides to share that information. Voucher schools aren’t required to report any of this data to the state, or otherwise make it publicly available.

Shielding this information has had serious consequences. Last June, St. John Fisher Academy, a school in the Racine voucher program, suddenly closed, leaving parents and teachers scrambling. Administrators blamed the closure on “lack of funds.” The school, it turns out, failed to pay teachers for months and lost nearly two-thirds of its students in its final year.

All but one of the 52 students attending St. John Fisher received a publicly funded voucher. Yet because the school was “private,” it wasn’t required to abide by the same openness laws as public schools. Without accountability and oversight, educators, parents and kids suffer.

The state has made some moves toward transparency. Beginning in 2010, voucher schools were required to report students’ test scores to the Department of Public Instruction (DPI). The state agency also collects voucher schools’ financial information, racial demographics and school policies; members of the public can obtain these by submitting an open records request.

Whether there will be further steps toward accountability remains to be seen.

Early drafts of Gov. Scott Walker’s proposal to expand the voucher program to nine school districts included a statewide accountability system, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported. (Ironically, the newspaper discovered this via records requested under the state’s open records law.) The system would have held all public schools and publicly funded voucher schools to the same standards.

But legislators scrapped these plans. Instead, Walker’s 2013-15 budget vaguely references the need for voucher schools to participate in a “statewide student information system.” DPI spokesman Patrick Gasper confirms this would make voucher schools report more data to the state, but says “the specifics of those requirements are not yet known.”

Even our education officials have been left in the dark.

Creating transparency in our schools is in the best interest of Wisconsin families, educators and policy makers. Parents deserve to know what’s going on in kids’ schools. And taxpayers deserve to know how their money is being spent.

Wisconsin prides itself on government transparency, through its far-reaching openness laws. The state’s publicly funded schools — be they public or “private” — should not be exempt from that tradition.

Your Right to Know is a monthly column distributed by the Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council, a non-profit group dedicated to open government. Sarah Karon is communications director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Wisconsin.

Bob Dreps, a veteran media law attorney, says law enforcement agencies across Wisconsin are “overreacting” to an Illinois federal court ruling by purging the names of drivers from public records.

Police in Wisconsin have begun withholding the names of drivers in police reports in response to a 2012 case involving the village of Palatine, Ill. A lawsuit there alleged that police violated drivers’ privacy rights by displaying names, addresses and other personal information on parking tickets left on windshields.

“The ability to have oversight over law enforcement is pretty minimal if you can’t find out who’s involved (in an incident),” Dreps says. “Without names, there’s no accountability.”

Dreps warns that this could lead to bizarre situations in which names of some alleged perpetrators, crime victims and witnesses are kept secret while others — those without driver’s licenses — appear in incident reports.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit, which includes Wisconsin, reversed the dismissal of a lawsuit alleging that the manner in which the citations were issued by Palatine police violated the federal Driver’s Privacy Protection Act.

The federal law lets aggrieved parties go back four years and carries a mandatory $2,500 per incident fine. Palatine, which was sued by a class of drivers who received a total of 32,000 tickets, faces a potential $80 million fine. It has appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Dreps says the ruling is not binding in Wisconsin, and does not change the state’s Open Records Law. But some law enforcement agencies here are nonetheless blacking out information that was once routinely available. (Ironically, law enforcement agencies in Illinois do not seem to be doing the same.)

According to news reports, the Marathon County Sheriff’s Office, Wausau Police Department and more than a dozen police agencies in suburban Milwaukee now withhold personal information obtained through state Department of Motor Vehicle records — including the identities of people arrested.

Dreps says the federal law was aimed at preventing states from selling their drivers’ license database to vendors, not keeping the public from knowing the names of people in police reports.

“The case doesn’t have anything to do with public records,” Dreps says. “It has to do with parking tickets left on windshields.”

Dreps is representing the New Richmond News, which is challenging the decision of local police to remove names from two accident reports and a report involving the theft of gas from a Kwik Trip.

In a letter to the paper’s publisher, Steve Dzubay, New Richmond Police Chief Mark Samelstad said he wouldn’t put the city at risk “by releasing certain information to the public that has been restricted by state or federal courts.”

State Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen issued an opinion in 2008 that Wisconsin law enforcement agencies do not violate the Driver’s Privacy Protection Act when they release records that contain drivers’ personal identification. But some agencies are no longer heeding that advice, and Van Hollen’s office now says it is waiting for the courts to clarify the Palatine decision.

On April 23, the lawsuit filed by Dreps on behalf of the New Richmond News was moved from St. Croix County Circuit Court to U.S. District Court in Madison.

Perhaps a federal judge or the U.S. Supreme Court will clear things up and allow police in Wisconsin to keep their black marking pens where they belong — in the drawer.

Your Right to Know is a monthly column distributed by the Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council, a non-profit group dedicated to open government. Dee J. Hall is a reporter for the Wisconsin State Journal and secretary of the Council.

Journalists and others often have cause to complain about the difficulties of prying public information from public officials. But sometimes there are reasons for optimism.

Wisconsin has one of the nation’s best systems for accessing court records, through Wisconsin Circuit Court Access. The system has saved county clerks of court countless hours providing this information.

Many local governments put property-tax records online, so owners can check assessments for fairness. Gov. Scott Walker has pledged to launch “Open Book,” a new program to provide detailed information on state spending.

And two recent developments have eased access to state records on child care and senior care facilities — institutions serving highly vulnerable populations.

In January, the Wisconsin Department of Health Services began posting online its inspections of nursing homes, assisted living facilities, in-home caregivers and other health-care providers.

The database includes any inspections conducted since July 2012. Older records are available on request from the Department of Health Services, in the Division of Quality Assurance, with a 25-cent per-page copying cost. For more information, see http://tinyurl.com/bsdnpvk.

It’s ironic that these records are now so easy to obtain, given that the state has taken steps to limit their use. A law passed in 2011 forbid these records from being introduced as evidence in any civil or criminal proceeding. But anyone can get them online.

The second recent positive development increased transparency in the child care industry.

Last year, the state Department of Children and Families expanded its YoungStar database. It now includes information on the fines levied against child care centers.

The database is easily searched by location, name and type of care. Individual profiles for each center include a YoungStar rating, as well as a list of dated violations and fines with descriptions and plans for correction.

As the Wisconsin State Journal reported, fines are listed for the past two years, with previous fines available upon request.

Anneliese Sheahan, a child care provider in Mosinee and president of a union representing providers, urges users to keep the information available on this website in perspective. Even though a violation is posted, she says, the provider may disagree with it or be appealing it.

But overall, Sheahan is supportive of the move because it gives parents more information about why a provider received a violation, allowing them to distinguish between smaller mistakes and more serious infractions.

For example, she says, one provider could be fined for operating over capacity simply because of a late pick-up by a parent, while another could receive the same type of fine for regularly caring for too many kids.

]]>jfoust@threedee.com (By Rory Linnane)2013 ColumnsMon, 01 Apr 2013 06:00:00 +0000Opee Awards highlight highs and lowshttp://wisfoic.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=262:opee-awards-highlight-highs-and-lows&catid=58:2013&Itemid=101
http://wisfoic.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=262:opee-awards-highlight-highs-and-lows&catid=58:2013&Itemid=101March 10-16 is nationalSunshine Week, meant to call attention to the cause of open government. For the seventh year in a row, the Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council is taking this opportunity to bestow its annual Openness Awards, or Opees.

The council, which works to protect public access to meetings and records, is giving four positive and one negative award. The winners will be invited to receive their awards at the third annual Wisconsin Watchdog Awards Dinner in Madison on April 24.

Here are this year’s honorees:

Citizen Openness Award (the “Copee”): The Center for Media and Democracy and the MacIver Institute. Both the liberal CMD, devoted to “exposing corporate spin and government propaganda,” and the conservative MacIver Institute, which champions free markets and limited government, found themselves fighting state legislators over access to records.

CMD and Common Cause successfully sued five Republican lawmakers to force the release of emails from their personal accounts that dealt with government business. And MacIver is suing a Democratic state lawmaker who seeks to shield identifying information from thousands of emails.

Political Openness Award (the “Popee”): UW-Extension Local Government Center. Over the last 21 years, this little-known public resource has been educating local public officials on the state's open records and meetings laws. It puts on workshops around the state for county and village officials, presents at various local government groups, and produces a range of fact sheets and other materials. The Center's good work can be seen athttp://lgc.uwex.edu//.

Media Openness Award (the “Mopee”): Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Wisconsin's largest newspaper showed courage and integrity in standing up to the Milwaukee Police Department and its openness-averse chief, Edward Flynn. It brought to light the shocking case of a man who died in police custody while begging for medical help, exposed deep flaws with the MPD's crime reporting system, and examined how a group of cops routinely conducted illegal strip searches of black motorists, among other important stories.

And, of top of all this, the Journal Sentinel won a legal battle against records charges that the Wisconsin Supreme Court deemed illegal — and which some records-keepers want to revive.

Open Records Scoop of the Year (the “Scoopee”): Matt Johnson, Vernon County Broadcaster. The editor of this small-town paper made multiple records request to ferret out the story about village of Readstown Police Chief Shay Larson, who was placed on administrative leave in late 2011 and found guilty last September of three felony counts of misconduct in public office. Johnson's dogged reporting, which documented not only Larson's transgressions but the village's failure to address recurring complaints, can be seen at .

No Friend of Openness Award (the “Nopee”): The Milwaukee Police Department. The MPD, led by Chief Edward Flynn, battled requests with delays and denials, including taking 10 months to release a squad video of a dying arrestee. It eliminated daily press briefings in favor of a PR-oriented website. And it fought all the way to the Wisconsin Supreme Court for the right to charge records requesters for blacking out information, and lost. This after the department arrested working photojournalists on two separate occasions in 2011.

Let's hope Chief Flynn and the MPD see the light and change their ways in 2013.